I don’t want to be the “Um, ackshually” guy, because I could see how the events in Andor can draw parallels to modern day events going on, but that’s more a byproduct of history endlessly repeating itself than any kind or profound political statement being made by the showrunners.
Case in point, the Ghorman Massacre was part of legends continuity long before the current snafu between Israel and Palastine became a politically charged topic and was loosely based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India.
It is very telling that people are seeing something like Star Wars, which is well known for boiling down everything into binary good-versus-evil themes, and self-identifying with the bad guys because it resembles something their government has done recently.
The Ghorman Massacre was even in the new continuity as of (at least) the 2017 Rebels episode Secret Cargo.
And in Andor, the aesthetics were obviously drawing on the French Resistance in WWII.
But this doesn’t mean the parallels to Israel and Gaza were not there. The “history repeats” aspect might be part of it, but because this was the first time the Ghorman Massacre was portrayed on screen in current canon, they had considerable leeway in how they told the story, what events framed it, and what parallels they were trying to draw.
There’s a reason they chose to rewrite Mon Mothma’s speech in the Senate from the one shown in Rebels, and that is that they wanted it to tell their message. They chose to frame it as a genocide that the overall population is wilfully ignoring. They chose to have disinformation campaigns coming from those in power which present the Ghormans not as the oppressed group of freedom fighters that they truly are, but as terrorists receiving aid from outside. They chose to show the Empire as willing to deliberately kill their own and have it blamed on the “terrorists”. Heck, they chose to place it in a place specifically called, as @Objection@lemmy.ml notes, the Ghorman Plaza.
Still, even if it is directly informed by the Gaza genocide itself, it’s obviously not meant to be a perfect allegory. It’s meant to be broadly applicable to all sorts of freedom fighting against oppressive authoritarian states.
To quote the grandfather of the very genre in which Star Wars as a franchise* sits:
I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
La mort de l’auteur. The best literature can be applied to a wide variety of real-world situations, depending on what the audience’s personal history is and which elements of the art they choose to concentrate on. So the Zionists look at the WWII French aesthetics and cling to that desperate to ignore the parallels to the crimes they themselves are complicit in. The most literate audience brings their own perspective, but also opens themselves up to hear other perspectives, and thus sees that there are multiple possible readings. The narrow-minded audience picks their interpretation and uses it as a reason to reject others.
* I would argue that Andor as a show is really a political thriller and science-fiction. But the core movies and most of the animated shows are fantasy.
I don’t want to be the “Um, ackshually” guy, because I could see how the events in Andor can draw parallels to modern day events going on, but that’s more a byproduct of history endlessly repeating itself than any kind or profound political statement being made by the showrunners.
Case in point, the Ghorman Massacre was part of legends continuity long before the current snafu between Israel and Palastine became a politically charged topic and was loosely based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India.
It is very telling that people are seeing something like Star Wars, which is well known for boiling down everything into binary good-versus-evil themes, and self-identifying with the bad guys because it resembles something their government has done recently.
The Ghorman Massacre was even in the new continuity as of (at least) the 2017 Rebels episode Secret Cargo.
And in Andor, the aesthetics were obviously drawing on the French Resistance in WWII.
But this doesn’t mean the parallels to Israel and Gaza were not there. The “history repeats” aspect might be part of it, but because this was the first time the Ghorman Massacre was portrayed on screen in current canon, they had considerable leeway in how they told the story, what events framed it, and what parallels they were trying to draw.
There’s a reason they chose to rewrite Mon Mothma’s speech in the Senate from the one shown in Rebels, and that is that they wanted it to tell their message. They chose to frame it as a genocide that the overall population is wilfully ignoring. They chose to have disinformation campaigns coming from those in power which present the Ghormans not as the oppressed group of freedom fighters that they truly are, but as terrorists receiving aid from outside. They chose to show the Empire as willing to deliberately kill their own and have it blamed on the “terrorists”. Heck, they chose to place it in a place specifically called, as @Objection@lemmy.ml notes, the Ghorman Plaza.
Still, even if it is directly informed by the Gaza genocide itself, it’s obviously not meant to be a perfect allegory. It’s meant to be broadly applicable to all sorts of freedom fighting against oppressive authoritarian states.
To quote the grandfather of the very genre in which Star Wars as a franchise* sits:
La mort de l’auteur. The best literature can be applied to a wide variety of real-world situations, depending on what the audience’s personal history is and which elements of the art they choose to concentrate on. So the Zionists look at the WWII French aesthetics and cling to that desperate to ignore the parallels to the crimes they themselves are complicit in. The most literate audience brings their own perspective, but also opens themselves up to hear other perspectives, and thus sees that there are multiple possible readings. The narrow-minded audience picks their interpretation and uses it as a reason to reject others.
* I would argue that Andor as a show is really a political thriller and science-fiction. But the core movies and most of the animated shows are fantasy.